May042011

“

[...]

The gentle hopes of Hamid Karzai and Hillary Clinton – that the Taliban will
be so cowed by the killing of Bin Laden that they will want to become
pleasant democrats and humbly join the Western-supported and utterly corrupt
leadership of Afghanistan – shows just how out of touch they are with the
blood-soaked reality of the country. Some of the Taliban admired Bin Laden,
but they did not love him and he had been no part of their campaign against
Nato. Mullah Omar is more dangerous to the West in Afghanistan than Bin
Laden. And we haven't killed Omar.

Iran, for once, spoke for millions of Arabs in its response to Bin Laden's
death. "An excuse for alien countries to deploy troops in this region
under the pretext of fighting terrorism has been eliminated," its
foreign ministry spokesman has said. "We hope this development will end
war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to
establish peace and tranquility in the region."

May032011

"We are looking at releasing additional information, details about the raid as well as any other types of material, possibly including photos," White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said on ABC News's Good Morning America show. "We want to understand exactly what the possible reaction might be to the release of this information."

The DNA evidence that confirmed Bin Laden was dead came through in the morning after the assault at Abbottabad.

By that time, US intelligence officials were 95% certain they had their man. He was identified by those who took part in the raid and by a woman in the building said to be one of the fugitive's wives.

Further identification came from photographs of the body that were beamed back to CIA specialists who compared them with confirmed images of the al-Qaida leader.

The DNA test left little room for doubt, with one intelligence official telling reporters they had "a virtually 100% match" of the body against DNA taken from "several Bin Laden family members."

As a prioritised task, the DNA analysis could be completed within six hours, said Mark Jobling, a geneticist at Leicester University where DNA fingerprinting was invented.

The first step was to extract DNA from a swab of blood or saliva, a procedure that can be done with a commercial kit in minutes. The next stage was to create a DNA profile to check against those compiled long ago from Bin Laden's relatives.

A genetic profile is based on regions of DNA called short tandem repeats (STRs). These are parts of the genetic code where a sequence of "letters", such as GATA, repeats several times over. The number of times an STR repeats varies from person to person, but is crucially inherited from parents, passed on to children and shared with siblings. A typical genetic fingerprint shows how many times 10 or more STRs repeat in an individual.

The match was obtained when the genetic profile of the dead man was compared with profiles already worked up for Bin Laden's close relatives, such as his sister, who is reported to have died in a Boston hospital. A sibling of Bin Laden's would share half his DNA, but a much stronger match was possible with profiles from more relatives.

In the words of the Financial Times’s Tobias Buck, Gaza is now “a safe destination for foreign journalists, aid workers and diplomats.” Conal Urquhart of the Guardian noted
that, since winning its first parliamentary election in 2006, Hamas has
gone “mainstream.” The real nasties in the Strip are now said to be
the “puritanical” Salafi-Jihadis, Koranic literalists with possible
ties to al-Qaeda who think Hamas is run by softies no better than
bearded Zionists.

Unfortunately, there are several problems with this analysis.

The first is that most Salafi-Jihadis used to belong to Hamas
themselves, particularly the hardline military wing, the Al Qassam
Brigades. Hamas admits this freely: an International Crisis Group
report on Radical Islam in Gaza
suggests that 60 per cent of imprisoned Salafi-Jihadis are former Hamas
members. Is this why one of the four suspects in the Arrigoni murder, Mohammed al-Salfiti, is an active Hamas policeman?

Hamas has not only created the conditions in Gaza that breed
schismatic ultras but also has long record of encouraging
Salafi-Jihadis. ...

[...]

...., Hamas has finally discovered the oldest trick
in the radical handbook: undercut the rising stars by stealing their
agenda. Hamas has lately imposed a host of draconian and unpopular
religious measures in Gaza, such as an insistence that men and women
who hold hands in public proffer a marriage certificate. The ministry
of religious endowments is offering “advice” on how to behave in a more
Islamic fashion. Men should neither cut women’s hair nor swim
shirtless. Mannequins in lingerie lead to tumescent Palestinians, so
they ought to be removed from storefront windows. More sinister moves
include the imprisonment of homosexuals and the arrest of one woman for
committing “adultery” with her own husband because her family disapproved of the marriage.

Internal terrorism has also increased in Gaza in recent months. Several UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency - oA:nth] summer camps have been stormed and burnt
because they teach children to do things other than blow themselves up
in Jerusalem. The Crazy Water Park was attacked by arsonists last
September, presumably because too many men were swimming shirtless
there. That involved 20 masked men in trucks – not an inconspicuous
sight in Gaza – and so many suspect the tacit approval of higher-ups.

These crimes, unlike the murder of Arrigoni, show no signs of
ever being seriously investigated or solved. Either Hamas is powerless
to control its own personnel or it’s reluctant to do so: take your
pick. As one Palestinian UN official put it: “Hamas is using the Salafi
groups to implement the social agenda that it fears implementing
itself.”

But none of this stops the construction of a media narrative
whereby the dirty work is done by unaffiliated fanatics whilst a
“mainstream” Hamas gets credit for cracking down on the very extremism
it’s been incubating.

March222011

Ten years ago, on the road in AfPak before
and after 9/11, the volume of choice in my
backpack was a French edition of Gilles Kepel’s
Jihad. Night after night, in many a mud
brick house and amid endless cups of green tea, I
slowly came to embrace its key thesis: that
political Islam was in fact going down, not up.

On one side, we had outfits like al-Qaeda,
self-designated vanguards bent on waking the
Muslim masses from their slumber to unleash a
global Islamic revolution; they were in fact
Muslim versions of the Italian Brigate Rosse and
the German Rote Armee Fraktion.

On the
other side, we had Islamists like the ones from
the Turkish Justice and Development
Party, ready to immerse themselves into
Western-style parliamentary democracy, betting on
the sovereignty of the people, not Allah’s.

At the height of the "war on terror" -
with those B-52s bombing Tora Bora without knowing
that Osama bin Laden had already escaped to
Pakistan - the tendency in the West was to lump
most, if not all Muslims as deranged jihadis.

I agreed with Kepel that "clash of
civilizations" was nothing more than a silly,
shoddily researched concept instrumentalized by
the neo-conservatives to legitimize their
"crusade". But that needed some corroboration from
history.

Ten years later, one may finally
say that Kepel’s analysis was spot on. Hardcore
Islamism, al-Qaeda-style, is a Muslim box-office
disaster. For all its myriad declinations - in
Iraq, in the Maghreb, in the Arabian Peninsula -
al-Qaeda is no more than a desperate sect,
destined to the dustbin of history as much as
those Western-backed dictators a la toppled
Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and
Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak who used to
be the pillars of the Western struggle against
radical Islam.

Kepel today directs the
program of studies on the Mediterranean and the
Middle East at the legendary Political Sciences
school in Paris. In an article for Italian daily
La Repubblica, he seals for good the victory of
Islam as democracy over Islam as "revolutionary"
vanguard. The money quote:

"Today the Arab peoples have emerged
from that dilemma - squeezed between Ben Ali or
bin Laden. They have now re-entered a universal
history that has seen the fall of dictatorships
in Latin America, the communist regimes in
Eastern Europe, and also the military regimes in
non-Arab Muslim countries such as Indonesia and
Turkey."

In a sign of Pakistan's increasing instability gunmen attacked
and killed Pakistan's minister for religious minorities earlier this
morning. Shabaz Bhatti, a member of Pakistan's minority Christian
community, had been vocal about Pakistan's draconian anti-blasphemy
laws. And he is not the first: in January, Salman Taseer,
the outspoken governor of Pakistan's largest province, was assassinated
by his own bodyguard while walking out of an Islamabad restaurant. The
bodyguard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, said he was simply doing his
religious duty, and that in denouncing Pakistan's blasphemy laws Taseer
was himself committing blasphemy, a crime punishable by death.

Pakistan's blasphemy laws are a colonial holdover put in place by
British administrators seeking to calm the subcontinent's fractious
religious groups. They were sharpened under the reign of dictator Zia
ul Haq, who added a clause calling for death to anyone found guilty of
slandering the Prophet Mohammad. Since then some 1000 blasphemy cases
have been registered. Though roughly half have been applied to religious minorities
the others have been registered against muslims, in what is widely
assumed to be the pursuit of personal vendettas. In one recent example
a schoolboy from Karachi is being held in jail for allegedly writing
insults against the on a school exam paper (because repeating what the
boy wrote would in itself be considered blasphemy, the accusation is
enough to keep him in detention. Though considering what happened to
Taseer, it could also be construed as keeping him safe). In another
example, a religious leader and his son have been accused of committing
blasphemy because they tore down a poster promoting an upcoming
religious conference.

Yet any attempts to amend these laws to stem such abuse has been met
with intense outrage by both religious leaders and Pakistani citizens,
who hold that the law is divine, and cannot be changed. The blasphemy
cases have become a boon for Pakistan's religious parties, who have
seldom done well at the polls. But with the country's current
government on the brink of collapse, religious group may be gambling
that the issue of blasphemy could leverage them into power if new
elections are called. Their gamble may well pay off. Qadri, Taseer's
assassin, was feted as a hero in Pakistan. In his confession, he said
he had been inspired by the teachings of his local mullah Hanif
Qureshi, who condemned anyone standing against the blasphemy law,
saying they were worthy of death. At a rally a few days later, Qureshi
claimed credit for motivating Qadri. “He would come to my Friday
prayers and listen to my sermons.” Then he repeated his point: “The
punishment for a blasphemer is death.”

But is it? Two weeks after Taseer's murder, I went to visit Qari
Muhammad Zawar Bahadur, a prominent leader of one of Pakistan's
mainstream religious groups and co-signer of a statement that advised
Muslims not to show “grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as
those who support blasphemy of the Prophet are themselves indulging in
blasphemy." For more than an hour he justified his groups' stance,
telling me that the Koran was clear on the issue. I asked him to show
me the exact verse detailing the punishments for blasphemy. He mumbled
that “there are several passages,” as if there were so many he couldn't
decide which one to quote. When pressed further he consulted a Koran
and read aloud one passage that spoke about killing a man who had once
harmed the prophet.

That verse has routinely been dismissed by leading Islamic scholars
as referring to a specific case and having nothing to do with
blasphemy. They say there is no definition of blasphemy in the Koran,
nor is there a prescription for its punishment (punishments are
mentioned in other books about the Prophet's life, but they are not
considered the word of God).

Yet few people stand up to the leaders who misinterpret the Koran
for their own ends. After what happened first to Taseer, and now
Bhatti, even less are likely to do so now.

Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's slain minister was aware of the threats that he faced in Pakistan.

Al
Jazeera has obtained the footage of an interview with the minister in
which he talks about how he would carry on fighting to end the
suffering of his community.

Bhatti's close colleague shared the
video with Al Jazeera saying that Bhatti had requested him to do so in
the eventuality of his assassination because "it is with the Muslim
world I want to share the message of love. That is the only message
that can bring the Muslim world out of the circle of hate and killings".